


stinging sign, open arms

by haloud



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Post-2x02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:07:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23363671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: Most nights, Michael leaves before the nightmares hit. This isn't one of them.
Relationships: Maria DeLuca/Michael Guerin
Comments: 11
Kudos: 51





	stinging sign, open arms

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from dead end road by delta rae

It’s different, having Michael in her bed.

She can’t decide if it’s easier or harder. If she wants to scoff at herself for playing house with him in the barely-furnished apartment over the Pony, or if she wants to roll over on her side so they’re all parallel, all tessellated, two half-curled commas on a thin mattress and a hard old box spring. If she wants to laugh at herself for having to psyche herself up to cozy up with this man.

He still smells like the water. That smell that used to be so sour to her every time she chucked him out on his ass; now she lays beside it in the dark, rolls it in her sheets, and she thinks of following Rosa down dry old riverbeds right after the rain and smelling a part of the distant past. It’s richer and sweeter than she ever imagined it could be, and she doesn’t know if he’s changed, or if she has.

Chad was a cuddler. He never understood that Maria hated sweating in her sleep and didn’t like to sleep naked; he’d treated it like an insult every time she rolled away, and she slept like shit clinging to the edge of the bed to put some distance between them. But Guerin had just blinked at her with those impossibly soft whiskey eyes, all sprawled out and debauched in her bed, watched her when she rolled off him, waited for her all quiet while she was in the bathroom washing herself off and getting ready for bed—and when she came back in her ratty old pajamas, he…followed her lead. She was treated to the view of his ass when he bent over to tug his boxers back on, and she laughed when he almost fell over doing it.

And with the lights out, deep asleep, she wishes follow the leader was as easy for her, and she wishes she could join him. But sleep doesn’t come so easy to her these days.

Guerin was…well, he was a _masterclass_ in dirty little secrets, yeah? He was every bad idea rolled into one, and he walked and talked like he knew it. She’d literally laughed at the idea of bringing him home. Of introducing him to…

Maria sighs, whole-body, and shifts her weight, curls up away from Guerin instead of towards him. Staring at the ceiling for the twentieth night in a row feels pathetic, like staring at the walls is any better. Like it makes the thoughts in her head any less horrible, about what her mother could be staring at right now. If she’s cold, or scared. If every time she wandered she only did it because she knew her daughter would be there, and now Maria has failed.

She sighs, and it catches, and she swallows down the soft sob that threatens to break loose, chip off another piece of her and vaporize it.

She hasn’t cried. Not yet, not really. She’s saving it for later, because she’s well past the point of knowing she’s going to need it. The heart doesn’t have any such thing as a renewable resource.

The bed shifts beside her, and Maria shuts her eyes, evens her breath, plays asleep because it’s better than trying to talk in the dead hours of the night, in the dark where words flow too easy. Guerin always sleeps so still, like he’s probably had to on that skinny bed of his, so he must be getting up for something.

Maybe even to leave. He does that sometimes, especially on nights like tonight when he hasn’t been drinking. If Maria was actually sleeping she might be hurt by it, but as is she gets to feel him, how he lingers, soft blue sorrow and gray uncertainty coming off of him in waves. And in the morning he might knock on the Pony’s door with his hat in his hands, and offer to make her breakfast.

It hurts and it doesn’t. It’s a work in progress; it’s on indefinite hiatus. She lets it keep happening and hopes someday…

Something.

But she doesn’t feel it this time, his weight lifting off the bed, the quiet rustling of him collecting his clothes. Instead, he just shifts again, and in the heavy-quiet she hears—the softest whimper, childlike, a sound so unexpected and so pleading her breath freezes in her lungs.

“Mom?” Guerin whimpers, and it hits her straight in the chest.

Nightmares. Okay, _that_ she’d sort of expected from the jump. You don’t drink the way Guerin has been drinking for the past decade without some demons to battle.

“M—Mom…”

Taking a deep, fortifying breath, Maria sits up carefully and turns to look at him. How he’s curled his knees up to his stomach, hands balled into fists clutching his own chest. She leans over him further, far enough to see the way his brow furrows, the way his mouth trembles.

“Oh, Guer—Michael…” She whispers, but it’s lost beneath his harsh breathing, so she tries his name again, just a little louder. “Michael?”

“Mom!”

He cries out a little louder, curls himself up tighter. Whatever dream he’s trapped in, it’s—it transforms him, from the infuriating man she knows to the person she’s only gotten glimpses of, small and scared and hurting. The kind of person whose eyes she won’t meet in the mirror every morning, and Maria—

She doesn’t know how to do this. Those muscles are ten years into atrophy. The only person who ever let her try was Rosa, and all those attempts would have ended in the bottom of a bottle no matter how hard Maria tried, no matter what Maria said or did. Liz never seemed to need her; Alex never let anyone get that close.

And for Maria herself, it’s only ever been…

“Mom…” Guerin moans, and she’s seven years old with the stomach flu. She’s ten, and she and Liz just got in their first real fight. She’s twelve, and she doesn’t want to be different anymore. She’s seventeen, and everyone is leaving her. She’s twenty-five and her head is spinning and the only person she has to turn to is the person she’s already grieving.

Her sob gets stuck in her throat, but Michael lets it out of his, and it’s that sound that breaks her, that echo of something strained and breaking from disuse, so forlorn and small, and the sound she makes is so fucking loud inside her own skull that she clamps a hand down over her mouth, and turns away from him again.

The damage, though, is done, and it’s that that wakes him—she feels him as he slams back into his body, bitter, bile grief, then confusion, then shame, then concern. For her.

Voice slurred and cracked from crying and sleep, Michael murmurs, “Deluca?”

All she can do is nod, back still turned to him. She’s here. That’s all she is; all she has to offer; the only comfort she can give. It feels so inadequate, and she has no idea what to say, if she could even bring herself to speak in a voice that’s no doubt shattered.

“Hey, hey, Maria…” he murmurs, voice getting clearer and softer. He shuffles a couple inches closer; his hand hovers over his shoulder, and she can sense his unasked question, so she just nods helplessly. Given permission, he gently turns her, to face him, right into his arms, to be held against his broad chest and warm, beating heart.

He holds her like something precious, something fragile, and god, _god,_ she tries to return the favor. She clutches him so tightly, arms around his back, short nails digging into his skin just enough to be a sharp sensation, undeniable. She pays him back by letting go, pouring out her measure of grief into his half-emptied cup. He kisses her forehead, and she feels the wetness of tears beneath his rough stubble, just on the edge of his jaw where it brushes her skin, so she turns her face tighter into the crook of his neck and lets her tears fall straight onto his skin.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” he whispers, long after the first blush of morning caries his nightmare away, long after her well runs dry.


End file.
